Corporate Channels: How American Business and Industry Made Television Usefu

In an era when television is increasingly discussed as fragmented, mobile, and on-demand, this dissertation examines the emergence of television as a new medium within a forgotten sphere of media practice to suggest that television has always been a multivalent technology that included decentralized practitioners and audiences engaging with the medium on a range of hyper-local and regional (as well as national) scales. Drawing from archival research in corporate, state, and institutional archives as well as interviews with industrial workers, media texts and artifacts, trade journals, instruction manuals, and newspaper reports, this project interrogates the crucial role business and industrial intermediaries played in the development of television's meanings, texts, affordances, and uses in the second half of the twentieth century. Further, I explore how television operated as critical tool of efficiency, expansion, and---presaging the rise of business computing---data management for its corporate and industrial users. In following these strains, this project builds on the recent groundswell of attention devoted to media use within institutional settings such as schools, government, military, corporate workplaces, and religious organizations as well as initiatives such as the Orphan films movement, which seeks to raise awareness of the serious threat posed to non-commercial, amateur, alternative and underground films by lack of preservation and scholarly attention. In attending to useful, institutional, and orphan television , this project challenges these rising subfields' persistent focus on film in order to better account for of the place of audio/visual media in everyday life.